Life on Earth is beautiful and unique, but with the threats of today it is easy to lose sight of what, exactly, it is we must save. Jack Ashton discusses some of the weirder animals that we are lucky enough to share our planet with.

Have you ever looked at the wildlife around you and really, really thought about how amazing it is? Each different species is unique, and entire ecosystems would not function without each one. After the recent documentary on BBC, David Attenborough’s ‘Extinction: The Facts’ I feel it is fitting to celebrate the wildlife on Earth, so this is exactly what I plan to do.

Let’s start on land, with insects. Even those that are common to us are incredible. What about the pollinators? Well, they effectively fertilise life. Caterpillars completely transform themselves to an adult butterfly or moth. Further afield, the Hercules beetle is the ‘strongest’ animal in the world, capable of carrying 850x its own body weight; the equivalent of a human carrying seven elephants! The cat flea can jump with an acceleration equivalent to over 20 times that needed to launch a space rocket, it’s just so small that it doesn’t quite make it to space. A far creepier trait is possessed by Western slave-making ants, which steal pupae from other ant species and raise them as slaves. All in all, though, insects are simply vital, feeding a ginormous array of other species.

Such as many amphibians, a group of animals at huge risk. These are amazing at a group level; they effectively drink and breathe through their skin by absorbing both water and oxygen. But individually, from cane toads that grow to over 50cm long to golden poison-arrow frogs that carry enough poison to kill nearly 20,000 mice, they are mystical. Glass frogs look as their name sounds – they have transparent skin to help with camouflage. There is the axolotl, which looks like a giant newt-tadpole combination. With their external gills displayed as frilly branches, they look rather amusing. They are capable of metamorphosising into an adult terrestrial salamander, but will only do so when required, such as if their water source dries up.

Onto our terrestrial mammals, and I start with the desert-living Bactrian camel. Many of us grow up thinking that camels store water in their humps, I know I did! But actually, they store energy-rich fat here, which breaks down to produce energy, CO2 and water to help them survive months at a time without food. Their other desert adaptations are even more extreme, to name a couple they produce dry dung to minimise water loss (it is so dry that it can be used for fuel the moment it leaves the animal), and they can survive a water loss of up to 40% of their body weight. Many mammals are frightfully clever, such as one particularly intelligent American black bear that discovered that Volkswagens were air-tight when closed. It would jump on the roof until the car caved in, blowing the doors open with the resultant air pressure, so it could get at any food within! Hyenas, which look like crazy, lop-sided dogs, are amazing scavengers and even eat bones – you can identify their poo by its white colour created by calcium. There is also one incredible bat, the North American red bat, that can withstand its body tissues freezing into ice during hibernation, before recovering when awaking. Lastly, perhaps the strangest-looking bat is the spotted bat which has ears almost the same length as its body, making it look ridiculously out of proportion.

Sharing the sky are birds (although some, of course, do not fly). Here, we have an array of species from the fastest animal in the world, the peregrine falcon, to the longest-distance migrant, the Arctic tern, which flies a 44,000-mile round-trip each year. In total, a single Arctic tern will migrate around 1.2 million miles in its lifetime, equalling three trips to the moon and back. Some have unique nesting habits: the violaceous trogon (a phenomenal name in itself) nests by taking over wasp nests, and the dikkop often lays its eggs in the dried dung of large mammals. Some are extremely strange-looking, such as the African skimmer, which skims the water to catch small fish. Its beak is adept at this, with the lower mandible being longer than the upper so it dips into the water as it flies. But, in my opinion, one of the oddest-looking birds are owls when you see them with their legs out. They are so unexpectedly long compared to their body that they look like they are walking on stilts.

The closest relatives of birds today are reptiles, and these can be completely bizarre creatures. The gharial crocodile is adapted to eat fish and has a long, thin snout with 110 razor-sharp interlocking teeth that can pick fish out of the water. There are 3 species of horned lizard with one of the oddest defence mechanisms on the planet – they can squirt blood from their eyes up to a distance of 1.2m but increasing their blood pressure. Lastly, possibly one of the most notorious adaptations is the marine iguana. Being the only truly marine lizard, they dive to forage algae off the sea floor, with a permanently content look on their faces.

Down here, in the underwater realm, the animals only seem to get weirder the deeper you go. On the surface, perhaps the most amazing ecosystems in existence are coral reefs, each being made up on an uncountable number of individual coral polyps, which are in fact animals. These are without a doubt the colourful, vibrant cities of the oceans; they even have cleaning stations. Elsewhere, there is the red-lipped batfish, a not-so-good swimmer that uses its fins to walk along shallower seafloors. With bright red lips and a spike growing from its head that acts as a lure, it looks like a rather unique clown. There is also the ocean sunfish, whose flattened bodies can grow up to 4.5m wide from fin to fin. With ovular lips, they make a very strange sight, and females can produce more eggs than any other vertebrates – up to 300,000,000 at a time. We also have the hooded seal here. These are worthy of mention because males have the obscure ability to inflate a red sack at the end of their nose, leaving them looking like they are balancing a balloon on their face.

Deeper below this is a band of ‘twilight’ water, where bioluminescent animals appear. These include lanternfish, which have a nasal light organ that acts as a headlight – in the dark they may look like a tiny motorbike coming towards you. There are also some crazy sharks down here, such as the goblin shark, which has a long, flat snout protruding from its face above its jaws, resembling a wonky sword. Then there is the frilled shark. On first glance, you can be forgiven for mistaking it for an eel – until it opens its mouth, at which point you will see the rows of recurved, razor-sharp teeth angled to snag prey, fixing it within its mouth. One of the most elusive animals here is the coelacanth – a ‘living fossil’ that was thought to have been extinct for about 70-80 million years, until one was captured in 1938. This is one of the most prehistoric looking animals on Earth, and they may give us an insight into the crucial stage of evolution when aquatic species took to the land.

We then venture into a world of complete and utter darkness. This world is lit up only by bioluminescent animals, such as the helmet jellyfish, which looks like a creature that has buried itself inside a translucent hat, showing nothing of itself except its glowing red tentacles. The only mammals found down here do not live here, but dive to feed; the weirdest, quite possibly, being sperm whales. With their strangely rectangular-shaped heads that make up 1/3 of their 20m body length and comparatively tiny, thin lower jaws, their slightly humorous look makes it difficult to imagine them eating one of the largest living organisms – giant squid. Giant squid have the largest eyes of any organisms to have existed at 30cm wide, and with 8 tentacles lined with serrated suckers to catch prey and drive it into a large beak, these jet-propelled giants are one of the most mystical animals on Earth.

We then reach the bottom of the ocean, which is where life was thought to have originated, and still persists to this day. There are volcanoes that spew out minerals from the Earth’s crust, from which bacteria produce energy via a process named chemosynthesis. These bacteria provide food for creatures such as: giant 5-feet-long riftia tubeworms, a small, pale octopus with only a scientific name, Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis, which is the only octopus endemic to hydrothermal vents, and yeti crabs, whose pincers and legs are furry (hence the name). In turn, one of the top predators in parts of the Mariana Trench is the Mariana snailfish, which is surprising, since it looks like a large, fat tadpole, and is the deepest-living fish ever caught.

If you needed convincing that all life is amazing, I hope I have done so. Sadly, no species are immune to the threats posed by humans – over 1 million animals are at risk of extinction, many of which I have described in this article. We cannot continue on this path, we must change. However, it will always be important to celebrate the biodiversity that we do have on our amazing planet. If you haven’t already, please watch ‘Extinction: The Facts’ on BBC iPlayer, as this gives an overview of the changes required. Everything is not lost, but everything must get better. We have to ensure that we are the start of a better future for everyone.

A Celebration of Biodiversity

Life on Earth is beautiful and unique, but with the threats of today it is easy to lose sight of what, exactly, it is we must save. Jack Ashton discusses some of the weirder animals that we are lucky enough to share our planet with.